Some Thoughts on Naturalism

I’m pleased that my last post on naturalism has generated some interesting discussion– pro and con –about naturalism. As I reflect on that discussion, it occurs to me that “naturalism” is one of those nebulous terms that means a variety of different things. For some naturalism seems to mean eliminativism, of the variety advocated by the Churchlands. For others naturalism means reductionism of the type advocated by evolutionary psychologists such as E.O.Wilson. There, all social phenomena are explained in biological terms pertaining to reproduction and survival. For others, naturalism means positivism. I do not advocate any of these positions, though I do think that theorists like E.O. Wilson shed important light on human behavior. I just don’t think they tell the entire story and that there are other causal factors involved that can’t be reduced to reproductive and survival aims. I take it that this is part of the importance of meme theory. There are a number of problems with meme theory, but one thing I think it does underline well is that there are replicators besides genes– cultural units –that contribute every bit as much to why humans are as they are and these replicators have “aims” other than biological reproduction and survival. Here, for example, we might think of soldiers facing almost certain death as they storm the beach at Normandy. They are acting on behalf of memes not genes, and are acting on behalf of aims that can’t be reduced to biological survival or reproduction. I think Lacan’s theory of desire nicely outlines these sorts of motivation.

For me, naturalism has a very broad meaning and is an open-ended project. I think there are three basic axioms one must endorse to count as a naturalist. First, one must hold that there is no supernatural causation, only natural causation. Put differently, there is nothing outside of the world. Note that this thesis says nothing about what natural beings exercise causal force in the world. Reductionists, for example, seem to hold that only atoms, genes, and neurons have causation. I believe that things like signifiers, narratives, discourses, institutions, objects (what I now call machines), atoms, neurons, genes, etc., all have causation. In other words, I reject that form of reductionism that only treats atoms or genes or neurons as having causation. I just don’t think that one has to privilege the agency of one type of being– say atoms –to be a naturalist.

read on!

Second, naturalism entails that one reject metaphysical teleology. The emphasis here is on the metaphysical. Within a naturalistic framework, there is nothing that nature is supposed to be, nor any goal towards which it is being pulled. Everything is contingent. The evolution of human beings, for example, was not a teleological necessity. Had some being stepped on the right slug, humans could have just as easily not evolved. Likewise, the acorn is not pulled towards becoming an oak tree. It is a set of efficient causes that leads the acorn to become an oak tree. With that said, I do not reject the thesis that teleological beings can emerge within nature. Humans, institutions, dolphins, octopi, dogs, etc., all seem to engage in goal-directed behavior. They envision future goals for themselves and engage in action to meet themselves to achieve these goals. These beings have developed cognitive systems capable of acting on behalf of goals. The point is that they weren’t metaphysically designed this way to become goal directed.

Third, naturalism treats culture as a part of nature. I don’t see how one can be a naturalist and advocate a bifurcated concept of being composed of two domains, the natural domain and the cultural domain. If nature is all there is, then culture is a part of nature. There can’t be one domain, nature, and another domain, culture. I have written about this elsewhere under the title of “wilderness ontology“. Within a naturalistic framework, culture is a understood as a particular ecosystem in which hominids such as ourselves are bound up. It is an ecology that includes weather pattern, mountains, rivers, oceans, but also signifiers, markets, institutions, groups, buildings, narratives, discourses, etc. It will be said that this is an abuse of terms, that when we refer to nature we’re talking about invariant laws of physics, chemistry, etc, or that when we’re talking about nature we’re talking about that which is untouched by civilization such as remote regions of the amazonian rain forests or Antarctica. Clearly naturalism can’t endorse this latter thesis as it holds that there’s nothing outside of nature. As for the first, it’s odd that one would treat invariant laws of physics as synonymous with nature. I suspect that most of us would agree that the complex ecosystem of a coral reef is a natural phenomenon. Those of us familiar with evolutionary theory would also agree that this ecosystem is contingent, or that the animal, plant, and bacterial life that lives there, along with the interrelations between these beings, was the result of a series of historical accidents that could have turned out otherwise. In other words, we recognize that the reef is both natural and that its organization is accidental and variable, not invariant. Granting this, why would we not make a similar claim about social relations and why would we not treat these relations as both natural and contingent? Culture is as much a natural phenomenon as anything else. This doesn’t entail that we reduce culture to the biological, neurology, or physics. Rather, it entails that we transform our understanding of nature to account for both the peculiarities of culture and the facts of culture as a natural phenomena. For example, we need to account for how, within a naturalist framework, it is possible for people like Kant to live their lives as bachelors, devoting themselves to their philosophical work. It is difficult for someone like E.O. Wilson, who sees everything in terms of biological reproduction and survival to account for such a life. This suggests that Wilson’s account of naturalism is mistaken, not that naturalism is mistaken.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that this means that we can just discount biology. In my previous post I took some philosophers to task for conceiving us primarily as knowers, rather than taking into account the fact that like all critters, we evolved for getting around in the world and reproducing. This led some to suppose that I was advocating an account of our being akin to Wilson’s. However my point– and I didn’t elaborate on it –was rather different. My point was that if we are to understand the nature of our minds, we need to take our biological being seriously. A number of thinkers working in cognitive science and philosophy of mind begin with the premise that we are primarily reasoners and that are minds are completely representational. The idea here is that reasoning is a set of operations that take place within the brain.

I do not deny that we represent, just that this is the entire story. Here’s the problem: test after test shows that 1) solving problems or reasoning purely in our minds is time consuming, and 2) we just aren’t very good reasoners. Now if we adopt a conception of humans in which we are primarily knowers, we’re likely to ignore these facts as mere curiosities, whereas if we adopt a biological perspective on our being, we’ll see this as suggesting that representationalism is mistaken. Getting around in the world requires real time response to shifting circumstances in the environment. A being that required extensive time to reason through problems would be tiger chow. Given that we’ve been pretty successful at not being tiger chow and that this has something to do with our minds, mind must be something different than what hardcore representationalists suggest.

Enter cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind like Andy Clark. Proposing a theory known as the extended mind hypothesis, Clark argues that mind is not simply what takes place inside and between your ears, but rather is a relationship between brain, body, and the things of the world. To solve these problems of real time response, Clark argues that we “offload” cognitive operations onto material things outside our brains. Take the example of solving a geometrical theorem such as the Pythagorean theorem. Most of us would have trouble doing this inside our heads. According to Clark, there are physical and biological reasons for this. As he puts it in Natural Born Cyborgs, our brains are evolved more to play frisbee– to respond in real time to physical events in our environment without thinking about it –than for engaging in abstract reasoning. Our short term memory, unlike a computer, just isn’t very adept at remembering long chains of reasoning. So how do we nonetheless do it? Clark contends that we offload memory on to the physical world outside us.

The paper and pencil that we use is not just an unnecessary prop that we use for the sake of convenience and that we could dispense with as representationalists would have it. Rather, paper and pencil actually extend our minds and allow us to engage in forms of reasoning that we would not otherwise be capable of doing. The paper remembers on our behalf. As I prove a geometrical theorem, I write down each step on a piece of paper. The paper preserves the earlier steps,allowing us to focus on the step we’re currently working on. Because the paper preserves the earlier steps, we can return to them when we need them for a new stage in the proof. More importantly, the paper reduces the work-load of the brain insofar as we don’t have to engage in the calorically costly activity of keeping all these steps in our mind, and increases the speed at which we’re able to solve the problem. Clark’s theory is anti-representationalist in the sense that he claims that cognition involves the use of physical entities outside the brain, rather than claiming that all cognition is the manipulation of symbols in the brain. For Clark, the paper and pencil are literally a part of the cognitive apparatus. This is not an idealist thesis as he’s not suggesting that mind makes these physical entities, but is rather the thesis that the tools we use are a part of our cognitive system. He could be mistaken– I happen to think he’s right –but the important point is that he’s able to arrive at this thesis by taking our biology seriously, by taking seriously limitations of our brains, memory, etc., and by taking seriously the fact that like all other critters we need to get around in the world, respond to events in the world in real time, etc.

Notice just how much Clark’s naturalism differs from that of E.O. Wilson’s. Clark is not making the claim that everything we do is really about biological survival and reproduction. In fact, Clark’s extended mind hypothesis seeks to explain how, through our use of various media, we go beyond our biology. The media that we use render us capable of things that at the level of simple biology we would not be capable of. For Clark the first prosthesis or mental extension we develop is language. Language, according to Clark, extends our mind dramatically, allowing us, for example, to think of entities in terms of general classes and in their absence in a way that would not be possible for perceptual systems alone. In many respects, though a naturalism, Clark’s hypothesis is diametrically opposed to Wilson’s. Humans become something different with each new medium they invent. We don’t simply endlessly repeat the same biological imperatives of reproduction and survival.

Another person suggested that our communal being is every bit as important to us as our biological being. This was used as an argument against reduction to biology and a defense of culture. However, this argument is already based on a highly contentious set of assumptions about what naturalism claims. In the field of biology, a number of theorists would not disagree. This is the case with biologists in the tradition of developmental systems theorists (DST) and evodevo, these theorists challenge the neo-Darwinian focus on genes as the sole agency defining development, as well as the inflated claims of evolutionary psychologists. Instead, they argue for parity of explanation, treating genes, proteins, cells, niches, and environments as forming a developmental system, where all factors contribute to what the phenotype will become. To give a very simple example, the pheromones that ant larvae are exposed to in their nest will determine what sort of ant they become (worker, queen, warrior, etc.). These are factors that come from the environment, not the genetics. There is an interaction here between the genes of the ant and these environmental factors, leading the phenotype to develop in a particular way. How the niche is constructed by the organism plays every bit as important a role in development as the strictly organic factors. To understand why organic beings take on the form and behavior they do, we have to understand the entire developmental system and how all these factors interact and modify one another.

This holds for humans as well. As Kim Sterelny notes in Thought in a Hostile World, we humans have significantly constructed our niche in ways that significantly impacts how we develop. Our niche consists of a culture that precedes us, the homes and infrastructure we’ve constructed, the media and technology that surround us, the practices we’ve developed, but also the ways in which we have chemically and organically modified our environment. All of this has an impact on how we develop both physically and cognitively. Development is not, as the poster seems to suggest, the unfolding of an algorithm inside the flesh of an organism, but is always “development with” in a milieu or a niche that contributes significantly to what the organism becomes. In this regard, we are not faced with the option of either attending to biological development or attending to cultural development. Both of these options are reductionist. Rather, development in a natural world necessarily involves all of these factors. We have to take both dimensions seriously and investigate how they mutually influence one another, modify one another, and generate unique individuations.

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10 Responses to “Some Thoughts on Naturalism”

Very thought-provoking stuff that, coincidentally, dovetails with work I’ve been reading for two different classes (I’m a doctoral student in Art History) in cognitive science (Alva Noe’s “Action in Perception”) and philosophy of technology (Stiegler and the “original technicity” of humans). I have nothing to add on the topic as yet, but this kind of serendipity is reassuring — makes me feel like I’m studying the right ideas.

Reblogged this on noir realism and commented:
Levi does it again… he offers us an irreductionist account of Naturalism. One based on three basic axioms: 1) first, one must hold that there is no supernatural causation, only natural causation; 2) second, naturalism entails that one reject metaphysical teleology; and, 3) third, naturalism treats culture as part of nature.

Fascinating. The first axiom might be tweaked. The claim that ‘there is nothing outside of the world’ doesn’t seem quite right. There maybe causal power before any ‘world’. Also space is derivative and being produced all the time. Admittedly it’s complicated….(smile). It may not be possible to locate some causal powers…

What about Jung’s ‘acausal orderedness’ as explored by Von Franz in DIVINATION AND SYNCHRONICITY (1970)? This somewhat jives with Deleuze in BERGSONISM (1966) where he discusses a causal order as being one half of the Absolute. If we consider the Absolute to be ‘pure difference,’ then there are actually two kinds of difference, two faces of the Absolute. It is split down the middle between quality-quantity but paradoxically, this split can only be perceived from one side. (i.e. from quantity, the opposition can be perceived, but from quality it is all continuous). Another way to think of it is that the Absolute is split between continuous (qualitative) and non-continuous, discrete or whatever — like analog/digital, no matter how close the 1’s and 0’s get to approximating a curve, it will never reach a true curve, it will always be divided. So Deleuze splits between the ‘divided’ and ‘undivided’ Absolute, we might say.

The quantitative split is the concern of science. Deleuze even claims that the scientific Weltanschauung is a built-in, a priori way of seeing the world — the quantitative perspective. Contrast this with the qualitative-mystical perspective (which is only opposed from the quantitative perspective, that is, all metaphors of opposition are quantitative).

So, all causality may exist at the level of quantity — cause and effect, contingency etc — but this does nothing to change the fact of ‘acausal orderedness’ which is revealed in e.g. synchronicity or in traditional Chinese philosophy, with the notion of two orders (temporal and eternal).

Tarnas addresses the topic of causality as it relates to astrology (which is an acausal orderedness):

‘It seems unlikely to me that the planets send out some kind of physical emanations that causally influence events in human life in a mechanistic way. The range of coincidences between planetary positions and human existence is just too vast, too experientially complex, too aesthetically subtle and endlessly creative to be explained by physical factors alone. I believe that a more plausible and comprehensive explanation is that the universe is informed and pervaded by a fundamental holistic patterning which extends through every level, so that a constant synchronicity or meaningful correlation exists between astronomical events and human events. This is represented in the basic esoteric axiom, “as above, so below,” which reflects a universe all of whose parts are integrated into an intelligible whole.

‘From this perspective, the planets themselves are not “causing” anything to be happening in our lives, any more than the hands on a clock are now causing it to be 7:30 PM. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state of the archetypal forces at that time. The fact that the planets constantly seem to indicate these things with such accuracy simply suggests that the cosmic order is much more profound and pervasive than our conventional beliefs have assumed. But the relationship between a specific planetary pattern and a human experience is best seen as one of meaningful correlation or correspondence, not one of simple linear causality.

‘There is, however, a sense in which causality does enter into the astrological perspective, and this is in the sense of archetypal causation (comparable to Aristotle’s concepts of formal and final causes). While the physical planets themselves may bear only a synchronistic connection with a given human experience, that experience is nevertheless being affected or caused–influenced, patterned, impelled, drawn forth–by the relevant planetary archetypes, and in this sense it is quite appropriate to speak, for example, of Saturn (as archetype) “influencing” one in a specific way, or as “governing” certain kinds of experience.

‘But why should the cosmos have established a systematic correspondence between planetary patterns and archetypally patterned phenomena in human lives? There are many possible answers to this question, not the least of which might point toward a kind of intrinsic aesthetic splendor in the universe, an overflow of cosmic intelligence and delight that reveals itself in this continuous marriage of mathematical astronomy and mythic poetry. […]’

I’m sure you disagree with Tarnas’ appeal to teleological final causes. But what if there’s a way to conceive of the archetypal without relying on metaphors of the transcendent? What if there is a purely immanent archetypal along the lines of Deleuze’s virtual?

Tarnas proposes something called Participatory Epistemology or Participatory Theory. Apologies if you are already familiar with this idea. I haven’t read about it much but it seems relevant to the discussion of naturalism.

From Wikipedia:

“A participatory epistemology is a theory of knowledge which holds that meaning is enacted through the participation of the human mind with the world. Originally proposed by Goethe, it has been discussed extensively by cultural historian Richard Tarnas.

“In a participatory epistemology, meaning is neither solely objective nor solely subjective. That is to say that meaning is not, per modern or positivist views, found solely outside of the human mind, in the objective world, waiting to be discovered. Nor, per postmodern or constructivist views, is meaning simply constructed or projected onto an inherently meaningless world by the subjective human mind. Rather, Tarnas argues that meaning is enacted through the dialectical participation of the human mind with the larger meaning of the cosmos. Thus meaning exists in potentia in the cosmos, but must be articulated by human consciousness before it exists in actuality.

“‘In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind.’ –Richard Tarnas

“According to Tarnas, participatory epistemology is rooted in the thought of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, and Rudolf Steiner.”

I love the ‘extended mind hypothesis’ you mention by Clark. I saw a talk here in Seattle at Ignite! (semi-annual conference of short talks on a variety of topics) which discussed computer programming as extension of mind. The idea proposed is as follows (I regretfully forget the speaker’s name):

The difference between books and computer programs are that I can give you a book which tells you how to do something, like edit photographs using analog tools. But, if I give you a program like Photoshop, you don’t have to know how to do something. The question changes from “how” to do something to merely “what” you want to do. (Perhaps the next question up the meta-chain is “why” …). The idea here is that the less time you spend on “how” to do something, the more time you can spend on the “what” and perhaps the “why.”

It’s the same with computer programming levels. At the machine code level, everything is describing “how” to do something, but the higher level computer programming languages only describe “what” they want. For instance, something like Microsoft Word could be considered an even higher level programming language than C, because you merely push a button to make something bold, instead of having to code “how” to make a word bold.

Buckminster Fuller is also relevant, especially his magnum opus SYNERGETICS (1975) which I continue returning to and seemingly never exhaust of its philosophical insights. Fuller claims that humans are distinct from other animals in that we have developed the ability to be ‘omni-generalists,’ but that we still have to fight the urge to be specialists. In Fuller’s opinion, over-specialization leads to extinction — we should all be Renaissance Women and Men. Fuller’s example is that birds can fly at the expense of walking (their wings prevent walking well), and that fish can swim well underwater but can’t survive outside of water. Humans, however, can wear prosthetic wings or underwater-lungs which we can put on and off at will.

Why are humans singled out here? How anthropocentric! Well, maybe it just ended up that way, due to some random contingency, who knows. Kerslake mentions the uniqueness of human in DELEUZE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (2007):

“For Bergson and Janet, the human being is an organism that happens to have become complex enough to open up a ‘zone of indetermination’ (Bergson, 1896) in its brain, which permits the suspension of habitual reaction and the appeal to past experience. This cerebral zone of indetermination becomes the ‘gap’ or ‘interval’ through which duration enters, proceeding to take charge of the organism, turning it inside out. Time surges into the brain, changing everything, so that now it is the brain which becomes shaped around an ever-accumulating ontological memory, rather than vice versa. Wherever interiorized duration arises, time pushes through and inverts the fabric of the universe, so that matter must now be taken as the envelope of temporal becoming, rather than time being dependent on matter. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes the Kantian point that ‘a succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants.’ At the moment that the material universe inverts itself and interiorizes itself virtually, it (starting with the brain) becomes shaped around time, rather than vice versa. There is an ascent, through the involution of virtuality, to an entirely new order of validity, beyond the order of actual fact.

“The emergence of memory through the zone of indetermination opens up a process of interiorized differentiation which proceeds to evolve in tension with the more generalizing tendencies of intelligence.”

[…] Fur Sich, Adam Kotsko has written a response to my defense of naturalism and materialism (here and here), accusing me of everything from believing that science gives us unmediated access to reality, is […]